German artist MADC was invited by the KOLLY GALLERY (Zurich, CH) to paint the MOLOTOW™ Train again (MADC on the MOLOTOW Train 2014). Julien Kolly, one of the pioneers of the street art culture in Switzerland and curator of the KOLLY GALLERY Zürich, organized an event in autumn 2015 at the MOLOTOW Headquarters, to celebrate the Gallery´s artist collaboration with MADC. Friends of the gallery and the artist paid a one day visit to watch her painting another beautiful Wholecar on the MOLOTOW Train. With this piece MADC shows the evolution of her artworks starting from Graffiti lettering back in the 90´s to what she is known for today painting murals and great art on canvas. Jump to see the video and photos as well as more information!
“MADC started her artistic trajectory as a teenaged graffiti writer, and has since then developed her creative endeavors into various fields such as graphic design, writing and fine art. She has studied at both Burg Giebichenstein – University of Art and Design, Halle and Central Saint Martins College, London, and carries a master degree in graphic design. MADC is also author and designer of street art related books such as Sticker City – Paper Graffiti Art (2007) and Street Fonts – Graffiti Alphabets From Around The World (2011) (both published under her birth name Claudia Walde).
As MADC she did her first graffiti piece already in 1996, and became known in the early 00’s for her burner walls, with dynamic wildstyle-pieces placed in detailed sceneries, often with themes and motifs taken from fantasy and sci-fi such as dragons and dinosaurs. Already these early works revealed a passion for meticulous accuracy. Her major international break trough came however in 2010 with the production of the work that has become known as the “700-Wall” – a 700 square-meter work along the train line between Berlin and Halle. This painting is most likely the largest graffiti mural created by a single person, and it was finished in four months time.
After the 700-Wall MADC has produced a few more thematic storytelling murals with detailed sceneries, but has also started to change direction in her artistic path. Since 2009 she has thus expanded her artistic outlet from graphic design and public murals into the format of canvases and fine art exhibitions. And in both her canvases and more recent murals the representational and narrative structures have begun to give way to more abstract painting, to images where the fore- and background have been flattened out and forged together with the middle ground as if the painting was painted on superimposed layers of thin glass.
The result may at first glance appear as a return to a more traditional wildstyle-graffiti, but appears on closer consideration rather as a step further away from her early work. The artistic strategy could perhaps best be described as an attempt to capture the energy of traditional graffiti, rather than its formal characteristic, by using the strong colors and dynamic lines from wildstyle graffiti’s letters, its arrows and bars, but abandon the outline and clearly defined areas next to each other for a layering of shapes – and thus creating an perception of transparent and liquid forms.”
KOLLY GALLERY: http://kollygallery.ch/artists/madc/
MADC: http://madc.tv
MOLOTOW TRAIN: http://molotow.com/magazine/the-molotow-train/
PHOTOS: MARCO PROSCH
